Translation challenge... for me

[zompist]

OK, Dhekhnami is kind of done, complete with pretty scriptie. But its vocabulary is a bit light, around 830 words.

So, if anyone supplies a sentence I'll try to translate it, with glosses. (Just one sentence at a time, please... entire passages seem like too much work.)

[Jetboy]

Sounds fun; here's one:
"The youth, however, responded with quick flicks of his wrist, showing sharp-edged coins their way through the air to pierce the itinerant projectiles."

[Radius Solis]

Aw, you should have opted for a syntactically challenging sentence rather than something merely over-written. Like, I'd have proposed "When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie." (from Trent Reznor). Or some other tricky extraction or embedding, possibly even just "That's the barn more people have gotten drunk down in back of than any other barn in the county.", my favorite sentence in the LCK.

[alice]

"One can work within any structure, but some structures are more appropriate than others, and there is no one structure which is universally appropriate."

[Nortaneous]

Two morphisms e and m are said to be orthogonal, which we write , if for every pair of morphisms u and v such that ve = mu there is a unique morphism w such that the diagram commutes.

[Delthayre]

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

All right, that's just my being a nixnuts.

"The vituperative judge arranged for the Bard to be burned to ash at the stake for vigorously raping his wife."

It's mostly just overloaded with vocabulary since that seems to be what Zompist is trying to develop, although I am curious to see if anything becomes of the potential ambiguity regarding whether the wife was that of the bard of or the judge.

For some reason many of the example sentences that I devise seem to involve bards, fire and sexual assault.

[rickardspaghetti]

Being a hopeless Dragon Age lover I here have an extraction from the Qunari holy text for you to translate.

"Struggle is an illusion. The tide rises, the tide falls, but the sea is changeless. There is nothing to struggle against. Victory is in the Qun."

[Legion]

Have some Bernanos:

"Dans un pareil univers d'animaux sensibles et raisonneurs il n'y a plus rien pour le saint, ou il faut le convaincre de folie."

in a same universe of animals sensitive.PL and reasoning.PL it not here has no_more nothing for the saint, or it must him convinces of madness.

Roughly:

"In such a universe of sensitive and reasoning animals, there is nothing left to the saint, or you have to prove that he is mad."

[Radius Solis]

"The vituperative judge arranged for the Bard to be burned to ash at the stake for vigorously raping his wife."

Objection! That word should be taken out back and shot.

[Jipí]

If people now start not only having words for 'mortar' in their conlangs, but also for 'vituperative', we know whose fault it is!

I think the sentence above itself might be suitable as a TC.

[zompist]

You people are marvelously devious. When I make my own samples, I try to be amusing but I stick too much to a simple vocabulary! This is all I have time for before dinner...

The youth, however, responded with quick flicks of his wrist, showing sharp-edged coins their way through the air to pierce the itinerant projectiles.

Ôwmin dzonjêbaf sanno penath wiwinyipwo genathiw dzan gleshu, dzubath poplondo tlath zêzêpwe shidziw oma glibla lithmin mwaba dzijibla wishimiw.
however respond.E.past young-man using pl-flick fast-act.part of wrist / guide.E.past pl-coin with pl-edge sharp-act.part through air in.order.to pierce.E.pl pl-projectile wander-act.part

[Salmoneus]

The last chapter of Ulysses?

More seriously, some first lines (obviously, I don't expect you to do them all, but here's an array of possibilities. I think they all ahve interesting translations elements, wither lexical or syntactical. Some are probably impossible to translate. Points for those who recognise them):

1.

"High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour."

2.

"I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled."

3.

"In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point."

4.

"Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me."

5.

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

6.

"Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up."

7.

"Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression."

8.

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

9.

"Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing."

10.

"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me."

11.

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo."

12.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

13.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

14.

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

15.

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."

16.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

17.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

18.

Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert.

19.

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

20.

The row of comconsole booths lining the passenger concourse of Escobar's largest commercial orbital transfer station had mirrored doors, divided into diagonal sections by rainbow-colored lines of lights.

21.

"I've watched through his eyes, I've lisented through his ears, and I tell you he's the one."

22.

"I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect - and tax - public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure."

23.

"Stock cue SOUND: "Presenting SCANALYZER, Engrelay Satelserv's unique thrice-per-day study of the big big scene, the INdepth INdependent INmediate INterface between you and your world!""

24.

"The stars, like all man's other ventures, were an obvious impracticality, as rash and improbable an ambition as the first venture of man onto Earth's own great oceans, or into the air, or into space."

25.

"This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying… but nobody thought so."

-----------

I know you said sentences, but here's the final paragraph of De Profundis anyway; as well as being beautiful, it's got some interesting syntactic elements, and some tricky terminology:

All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

Finally, three sentences from Hume:

That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.


Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.

Eloquence, at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection, but addresses itself entirely to the desires and affections, captivating the willing hearers, and subduing their understanding.

And now I really want to break out some Nietzsche, but I must constrain myself where I stand.

[bulbaquil]

If people now start not only having words for 'mortar' in their conlangs, but also for 'vituperative', we know whose fault it is!

I think the sentence above itself might be suitable as a TC.

I agree.

And in response to the aforesaid "sentence above", I'm guessing the presence of the word "mortar" is likely at least partly attributable to the fact that it is necessary to translate the Babeltext (specifically, verse 3)?

[So Haleza Grise]

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

[Jipí]

1) is Changing Places by David Lodge
11) is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
13) is Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy

Those were kinda non-obscure ones, though.

14) might be Joyce as well (Finnegan's Wake?), I remember a snippet by Joyce similar to that which we were asked to categroize/analyse in a seminar on text analysis, though we got it in German translation.

[Salmoneus]

I'd say that 9, 12, 15 and 16 should be recognised by EVERYBODY, as among the most famous lines in literature. Well, 9 isn't, but it's a very famous book, and knowable from the quote.

The early ones are easier than the later few, since the later few are genre books.

Personally, I'd further say that 2, 8, 10, 14 (yes, you're right), 17, maybe 18, and 25 should all be recognisable too. 2 and 18 on content, 8 and 25 due to sheer fame (although 25 is the first line of a prologue; the first line of the first chapter is even more famous, at least for genre readers), 10 and 14 due to distinctive style, and 17 due to both content and fame.

[Jipí]

9 is Don Quixote (A translation of the original text by Cervantes? I've never read it.), and 15 Lolita (I haven't read that either and don't know the author, but since the name appears as the first word, well...)

There is the snippet from Finnegan's Wake I meant, which corresponds to the sentence you posted:

Flußaufs, vorbei an Adam und Eva, von KüstenKurven zur BuchtBiegung, führt uns durch eine kommodien Ouikuß der Rezierkuhlation zurück nach Haus Castell und Emccebung.

[Soap]

14 is the only one I recognize and know the title of the book it came from. 9 and 12 I recognize but don't remember teh titles offhand.

I dont do a lot of reading and I dont even own any books that arent textbooks of some sort or really old things that I dont read but havent thrown out either.

[Jetboy]

21 is from Ender's Game, no?

[Civil War Bugle]

The snail, who had never studied calculus, bitterly and voceriferously harrangued his titchy unwanted shellmate over the rude slur on his education the fellow had made.

Will any of the sentences be used for illustrative purposes in the grammar you make public, or is this purely a vocabulary building excersize?

You may use any or none of the sentences in this post.

[WeepingElf]

#8 is the first sentence of Neuromancer by William Gibson.

[dhok]

I'll give you a little story.

The ktuvok appeared before the Sarnáeans, speaking in a very raspy version of Dhekhnami, which the man before him was translating into Sarroc. He explained that the ktuvoks were chosen by the gods to rule over men, who were lousy at ruling themselves, and that the Sarnáeans should just accept it and maybe someday they'd rule over somebody else. For that reason, the Sarnáens shouldn't rebel against Dhekhnam.

Hearing this a man in the crowd stood up and began to speak. He wasn't a priest, but a normal man, a farmer. He shouted at the Sarnáeans. He invoked glory of Cadhinas; he reminded the people that they spoke a descendant of Cadhinor, that they were the children of Ervëa, and that as free men they were destined to rule themselves, or at least be ruled by the Verdurians, and not to be slaves to gigantic, malevolent frogs. This was bad enough, but then it got worse. He declared that Enäron would not allow Cadhinorians to remain in bondage under the ktuvoks, and that it was only a matter of time before Verduria- the new Cadhinas- would liberate Sarnáe.

The crowd was frozen; they sympathised with the man (they'd heard stories of Verduria, a place where you chose the government, can you imagine?), but they did not want to bring about the wrath of the ktuvoks. The man was ordered to come up and, in front of the crowd, a solder took out his sword and ran him through.

After some words of warning about disobeying the ktuvoks, the people were ordered to go back to their chrêms and not think about such foolishness.

[Delthayre]

So, if anyone supplies a sentence I'll try to translate it, with glosses. (Just one sentence at a time, please... entire passages seem like too much work.)

Reading. Comprehension.

[dhok]

So, if anyone supplies a sentence I'll try to translate it, with glosses. (Just one sentence at a time, please... entire passages seem like too much work.)

Reading. Comprehension.

Oh. Uh, find a sentence you like.

[rotting bones]

You guys are doing such an awesome job turning Dekhnami semantics into an imitation of literary English that I'd only screw it up if I tried to help:

"Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them."

Fairly straightforward semantics, and that's more like something a native speaker would actually say.

BTW, not a single lexicon lists a word for "process", not even Verdurian.